I read Marvel Previews ($1.25 a month!) always hoping to catch a flicker of Indy comic news, and to see everything they're throwing at the wall these days. I often wonder who reads this stuff and how many. Here's a site with some answers, and terminology (I guess I'm a "trade-waiter" if anything.) Meet Marvel Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing David Gabriel.

"I'm going to tell you, the limited series is the death knell,” Gabriel said of the current market environment. "The only place that it hasn't been a death knell, which is amazing, is on the Star Wars stuff. Anytime we've called something a limited series, it did not hurt the sales at all. You call anything else in the Marvel Universe a limited series, it's dead on arrival."

Hopefully this applies to Indy if they do 4 parters. On reboots and restarts:

Quote:

"Over the past three years while we've been doing this, we've been seeing, time and time again, phenomenal, phenomenal numbers going from 100,000 to 300,000 when we've done some of these launches. Once you get to issues 15, and 16, and 17 what in the world do you do to get those numbers from a 40,000, 60,000 unit book to 150,000 unit book even for one month?"

This is the pattern I've seen, few titles getting past 15 or 20, just starting over. But the October "Marvel Now 2.0" relaunch apparently fell flat and tons of comics were returned to Diamond. And here's how David Gabriel made headlines:

Quote:

What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.

It's amended by some PR spin that claims the opposite. Nearly every Marvel character has experienced race and gender bending at some point (though they never get short or fat). Hopefully they re-find their groove in this digital world.